


and everything she's ever known

by BiblioMatsuri



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: (ao3 ate my original tags so heck it i'm not tagging all the background chars again), Body Horror, Character Study, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Horror, Speculation, Trigger warnings in the chapter notes, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 16:11:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17025876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiblioMatsuri/pseuds/BiblioMatsuri
Summary: And that was how she’d gotten here: Chicago Midway International airport, at damn-it’s-dark o'clock, looking around for a nice quiet poorly-lit spot with no security cameras watching.





	1. a swirling-in-on-itself

**Author's Note:**

> An old fic I wrote for [DP Worldbuilding Week 2017](https://bibliomatsuri.tumblr.com/post/162997888449/world-building-week) over on tumblr. This is technically a rough draft that I'd meant to expand on, and have only somewhat edited for coherency; but, since tumblr is dying, I'm backing it up over here before I lose it completely.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She wouldn’t really mind disappearing, she thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for [DP World Building Week 2017](https://bibliomatsuri.tumblr.com/post/162997888449/world-building-week), Day 3: **Sojourn** / Unworld. Warnings for canon-typical awfulness, and non-canon-typical acknowledgement of the consequences of a little kid traveling around alone all the time. (Less facetiously: Dani gets drugged, kidnapped, and stuffed in a dark room along with other people in the same boat. Also, body horror and psychological horror aplenty: unreality, disassociation, a touch of suicidal ideation, brief gore, chronic pain…)

The first time Dani enters the Ghost Zone, it’s a complete accident.

Really, it is! She lies down for a nap in the forest near some tourist spot in Brazil, an old archaeological dig site that’s no longer in use by academics.

Minus the euphemism, that means that people already came and went and looted all the stuff that was small enough to carry. 

Now sometimes people come and chip off bits to keep. It seems like an awful lot of risk and effort for a little rock-souvenir. Memories take up enough space in people’s lives, don’t they?

Anywho, she doesn’t have too much trouble playing tourist. She’s got the awful American Tourist accent down. And if anyone bothers asking what a kid’s doing all alone, she just has to spin out some excuse about meeting up with her family later. Our hotel’s right over that way, honest!

Sometimes people are actively terrible about her being a little foreign kid out on her own, not just nosy. Luckily, Dani has combat programming that works just fine on adult humans, and she can totally regenerate from being shot or stabbed or whatever. It hurts like burning, but that’s the complete opposite of new.

But sometimes strangers give her directions, or pocket change, or some of their lunch. Those are nice.

And sometimes the food they give her makes her sleepy and she wakes up in a dark place surrounded by humans who feel like fearpaindesperation, make it stop, _get us out_ -

Well. Anyway, Dani thinks she’s about done with city centers for a while now. Forests are good. Forests are full of brightly-colored things with teeth and venom and poison, and bugs that carry awful diseases, and water that’s not safe for humans to drink untreated. She’s okay here. She’s okay.

She wouldn’t really mind disappearing, she thinks.

She falls asleep in the undergrowth, leaning up against a tree she’s pretty sure is yet another variant on a palm. The light is green through the crowns of the trees, and the air feels thick in her lungs.

She wakes up to light, and heavywet air, morning breath clumping sour on her tongue. She lays still where she is for a little while.

And she notices she’s lying on rocks, and not plant matter or soft dirt, and now she is very very very awake all of a sudden.

Still, the light is green, but _this_ \- this is darkdeep, boiling ectoplasm green. And for a moment or forever she is back in the tank, back where she came from, _she can’t go back_.

She doesn’t notice it’s cold until she realizes she’s shivering. Doesn’t notice that until she brings her hands up to check that her hood, her hat, undershirt and shorts and shoes are still on. All her bits are still where she left them the last night, and that.

That’s almost more terrifying than waking up in this terrifically strange green place, where the air is so thick she almost wants to swallow it more than inhale. It tastes like nothing alive and nothing at all and everything she’s ever known. She wants to run, wants to hit something, wants to hole up and hide for the next week straight. Wants to stay here. She knows it here. It feels like meeting Danny for the first time did, like saying goodbye because she wanted to go.

She had to, yeah, but she wanted this – wants to see, wants to find and find out, wants to touch everything in the world with her own hands and figure out how it works.

Dani is aware that she is very human for a ghost. She’s not sure whether that’s a good thing, yet – she hasn’t actually met any ghosts besides a few of the ones that worked for Vlad, and those can’t be enough for a representative sample – but she is, and that’s that. She’s never been anyhow or anybody else.

She looks down first, lets her eyes focus on the worn-fabric familiarity of her scrawny self in the same beat-up clothes she’s had since she can remember. She used to have an extra set, for laundry day, but she hasn’t had that since she disobeyed Vlad and started running.

And she doesn’t have any way to do laundry, anyway. At least she doesn’t usually smell too bad. Dissolving, destabilizing, resets her to the same condition she was in earlier minus impurities. So she comes out of that minus dirt and yucky stuff, but she loses partly-digested food and anything in her pockets, too.

She literally always smells like death ‘cause of that, but humans don’t pay enough attention to what their noses tell them, either.

She rethinks that thought a few times, and rewords it to “humans and failed half-ghost experiments.” If she’d been paying attention, she would have recognized the not-really-a-recognizable-smell of unshaped ectoplasm.

In a human body, smell is tiny bits of chemicals and physical matter meeting up with specialized receptors up and behind the nose. There’s nothing really physical about ectoplasm. It’s not anything eyes can see, or ears can hear, or noses can smell. But that doesn’t matter, because all of those senses are really happening up in the brain, anyway. And for whatever reason, the default response of a human brain to running into unshaped ectoplasm is just a vague swirling-in-on-itself thingy made of _green_.

Dani is looking up.

There’s so much green. It’s like looking at her insides, except without as much awful horrible pain distracting her from looking at cool things. There’s just a little tingling itch in her feet and fingers, a distant warning that she needs to eat something alive-or-close-to-it in the next day or two or she’ll destabilize again. Which hadn’t been a problem in the wet-green forest, the – wait, wet.

Water forest? _Rain_ forest, that was what she’d been thinking of! Stupid. She needs to hurry up and learn more human languages, there are way too many to sort through and her powers are too glitchy to work as a cheat code like ghostliness is supposed to.

Ghostliness. Existence as a ghost. Right.

She’s surrounded by ectoplasm, standing on a weird floating rock that looks sandy but feels more like carpet or mud under her shoes. There’s too much give to it.

A whirl of green opens up inches away from her. She watches, not knowing what-if-anything she should do in response to this. It reaches toward her, unfurling tendrils like fern stalks, and the ends hook into teeth.

She blasts it.

She spits a little backsplash out of her mouth, and peels the bigger fragments off her hoodie. She didn’t get too much on her shorts, she thinks, though she’s not sure how that’s any help.

She shakes her head, letting the hood fall down, and pulls her ponytail out from where it got caught between her shirt layers. Then she bends down, tightens the knots on her shoelaces, and starts looking around for anything that looks like a stable path or halfway-drinkable water.

She pushes off the rock, floats around until she hits something else mostly solid, and repeats the process until she gets too tired. Then she naps. Then she does it again.

If she could get into the Ghost Zone by accident, she can danish well find her way out.

And she’s really getting thirsty. And the stinging in her feet is up to her knees now.

Dani is half-out-of-it, vision blacking and lighting up at the edges, by the time she falls through a twisty-thing of greenness and not-thereness and falls out the other end someplace where it’s actually sandy. She knows because she just landed in it.

Someone – someone human, not speaking any language she’s heard enough to name – pulls her up and out of the dust. Someone else brushes sand out of her eyes, and she lets them. No point fighting when they’re not trying to hurt her.

She was kind of expecting to sleep in a tent that night, but apparently this is another thing that movies lie about. She gets put in the corner of the second human’s room, freshly washed and in borrowed pajamas, sleeping on a whole bunch of equally clean and borrowed blankets.

A girl, she thinks, a little bit younger than Dani looks like. She looks tired and sounds excited and smells like she’s usually worrying about something. 

She’s not scared at Dani, which is nice. Scared people do mean things, and Dani’s pretty tired out after today.

She stays with them, the girl and her family in a little thin-walled house in a little thin-walled town where everybody knows everybody. Apparently, weird foreigners appearing in flashes of light is just something that happens here sometimes? Because nobody seems even a little bit surprised about her.

Dani chips in with the chores. She has no idea how to do them, but she can learn, and she wants to. The girl and them are sharing their food and stuff with her, so she should pay them back.

One time, they all go down to the sea. She’s never eaten just-killed roasted fish before, but that’s definitely a meal she’s going to try to have again sometime.

She doesn’t really understand why these people keep taking her places. They must be really bored.

The moon’s phase is back the way it was when she came, the night she finally gathers up the courage to go. Sure, she could stay longer – but there’s literally nowhere on Earth that Vlad’s goons can’t find her, and she’s not sure if the Ghost Zone would be any better. It doesn’t matter, anyway.

Dani leaves the clothes they loaned out behind. The last set she’d put on, she washes and hangs up on their clothesline. Clean blankets go on a chair, clean clothes go on top. The dirties she’d slept on were… still on the bedroom floor, actually, but Dani doesn’t want to wake her up.

It’s okay, she thinks. She’ll figure out how to fix the trouble that follows her, somehow. Until then, she just has to keep walking.

The next time she ends up in the Ghost Zone, she’s running down a hill and trips on air. She lands badly, in another world.

She gets up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 19 July 2017 #danny phantom #world building week #fanfic #matsuri writes #unedited piece of crud #dani #this came out more of a character study again #kudos to monotype's ghost zone posts for inspiring that description bit #OC #for some reason i'm imagining jade harley now #not sure if i should be worried abt that plotbunny or happy #i'm literally falling asleep as i type this #gonna post and good night


	2. daily and nightly, in little ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He had wanted his daughter, the single best part of his life at that point – and, for the sake of complete honesty, the best part of life as of right now – to be alive and healthy and happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for DP World Building Week 2017, Day 4: Elmerton / Amity Park. Tie-in prequel to “lighter when you turn it around”. Damon Gray POV, future fic loaded with headcanons. More character study than worldbuilding, really. Warnings for offscreen violence and canon-typical Vlad-awful (ft. weaponizing children for fun and profit). Also, I made up a mom for Valerie, fridged her, and then I think I gave Damon anxiety. Title from Rebecca Sugar’s “Everything Stays”.

Damon gets off the bus at the corner of Sixteenth and Delanoya. Sixteenth Street is one of the major roads, the big black lines on the grid-pattern map of Elmerton as seen from an imaginary helicopter. Delanoya is one of the smaller side streets, narrowish and quieter and leading into a residential area. It’s all narrow, aging apartment complexes.

That, and boarded-up street-level spaces that used to be shops, before industry abandoned Elmerton to the sandpaper abrasive effect of economic decline. Peeling posters advertising fad diets and grime-coated FOR LEASE signs that are probably older than his daughter look down at him on his walk home.

Honestly, sometimes it feels like the whole world is looking down on him. Then he remembers that that is quitter talk, and Damon Gray is a lot of things-

 _Stubborn, too clever for his own good, chicken_ and _mother hen_ have all made the list at some point.

-but he’s never quit anything, not until he’s actually run entirely out of other options. He has a job and an apartment, he has friends and he has family. He’s rich in the ways that really matter, and that’s what’s important.

Riches of the heart don’t make the September wind any less cold or damp, though. The walk home down Delanoya is long and irritating on a good day, and honestly pretty exhausting on a bad one. Luckily the weather isn’t cold enough yet for snow or even slush. Damp pavement from last night’s rain is infinitely easier to deal with than icy spots. Street ice is one of the seven circles of hell, even if it’s not the deepest one.

Damon pushes through the usual day’s-end pains (many and varied, starting at his feet and upper back and radiating out from there) and keeps walking through the rush-hour crowd. Elmerton has absolutely nothing on NYC as far as the foot traffic goes; or the rush-hour automobile traffic, come to think of it. On all but the worst days, he at least has enough personal space to himself that at least his feet aren’t repeatedly stepped on. Well, being six-foot-five and mostly muscle doesn’t hurt on that front. Damon hasn’t needed to worry overmuch about walking home alone since his growth spurt in tenth grade.

Valerie, on the other hand, had given him a half-dozen heart attacks per day just thinking about the risks involved for a girl walking home alone at night. Back then, he’d mistakenly blamed long shifts at the Nasty Burger – which, in hindsight, had been a transparent alibi. Valerie had taken the weekday afternoon and weekend day shifts by preference, and early morning shifts otherwise. Nighttime had been reserved for ghost hunting. As it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about Valerie getting mugged or stabbed or – (he can hardly think it) – raped in some dark alleyway, because she was busy flying around on a rocket board killing monsters with ray guns.

They’d had a lot of conversations about that, since the ghost kid had outed her. The first few months’ worth had been less conversing and more shouting at each other loud enough to make his chest hurt, but she’d dug her heels in and given as good as he’d got. Damon was never going to stop being proud of Valerie; but damn, did he wish sometimes that she’d gotten a little less of his drive and simmering temper, or of her mother’s hard-edged sense of justice.

Gloria had always been far beyond her name, great beyond what his clumsy words could have ever said. Looking back, Damon could think about his honestly pretty mediocre efforts at grand romantic gestures and eloquent love poems without cringing too much. At the time he’d been too embarrassed to every show her any of them.

She’d been responsible for Valerie starting karate and self-defense lessons in third grade, as a safer outlet for an explosive temper than actually exploding all over her classmates when things didn’t go the way she’d wanted.

Gloria had taught Valerie how to fall and stand and kick hard enough to really hurt, but Damon was the one who took Valerie to work with him and showed her how to hold a gun safely. How to load the magazine, aim, fire.

He remembers when he’d thought those lessons were harmless. Valerie had actually wanted to hear about part of his work for once, not just brushed it off as ‘boring grown-up stuff’ the way she did when he talked about blind spots in camera angles and building-material stress tolerances, and he’d wanted so badly to bond with her before she got too old and stopped wanting to spend time with him at all.

And then sudden road ice on a late-night drive, and the ambulance had gotten there too late, and-

Well, the distance that had sprouted up between him and Valerie after her mother died might not have been _entirely_ his fault; but he sure could have pulled his head out of his anus a few months sooner, and maybe he would have been close enough to his daughter that she wouldn’t have felt like she had to keep a thing like _ghost hunting_ secret from him.

It hadn’t been her, mostly, that he’d been so furious with in the immediate aftermath of the revelation. He was angry and disappointed in himself, of course, for not noticing – but he’d been home hardly at all, in the early days after the move, and having a night job meant he spent most of the days sleeping to recover in time for his next shift.

And he had been mad at Valerie, for keeping some crazy thing like that to herself for so long. Worse, for recklessly risking her life for a vendetta that wouldn’t fix anything no matter how many ghosts she shot.

But mostly, he’d wanted to find out who the damn hell had supplied a fourteen-year-old child with sci-fi weapons and set her fighting things straight out of a horror film. Laser guns.

Who knowingly gave a child weapons? What kind of maniac would give an angry teenager a box of guns, and then encourage them to keep using them?

The kind of maniac Vlad Masters is, apparently.

He’d _worked for_ the man, before. Worked in a company he owned, at least – him and half of the Western Hemisphere, and an increasingly fast-expanding demographical pie-slice of the East.

Damon is never going to admit it to anyone who might repeat it anywhere near Valerie, but he is in hindsight nearly grateful to whomever might have been responsible for that ghost dog smashing up Axion Labs. Whether or not it actually was Phantom matters a lot less in light of the revelation that, that-

One of the richest, most powerful and most influential men in the world is the kind of person who thinks emotionally manipulating a child into killing his enemies for him is a perfectly alright thing to do.

Damon had needed a long sit-down with a bag of in-shell walnuts and a nutcracker while he’d thought around the implications and likely consequences of that. It wasn’t the most manly way to vent, no dusty punching bag or long walk outside in the pouring rain, but it was a lot easier to clean up afterward.

Logically speaking, forbidding Valerie from ghost fighting had been a completely obvious solution. He had wanted his daughter, the single best part of his life at that point – and, for the sake of complete honesty, the best part of life as of right now – to be alive and healthy and happy. And first of all, alive.

…naturally she’d wound up with even more weapons. Weapons that were wired into her subconscious, and couldn’t actually be removed. Ever.

It was a very good thing he’d been able to afford over-the-counter sleeping pills. Being too stressed to sleep was not conducive to being able to stay awake and lucid and able to respond to security threats on the job. The Fentons giving her a clean bill of health had also helped.

The Fentons of all people saying that had made it less than a hundred percent reassuring, but Damon has long since learned to manage the little doomsaying panicking voice at the back of his head.

Working in security gives him a reliable outlet for all those little fears and near-constant disaster-seeking. Being a night security guard is about a thousand steps down from designing cutting-edge computerized alarm systems for equally cutting-edge tech companies, responsibility-wise and pay-wise, but at least it gave him plenty of free time he could use to reflect on his life so far.

Scheduled father-daughter bonding activities every other weekend have been a reliably surreal effort, with mixed results. On the one hand, there’s still a part of him that thinks of Valerie as eternally five, as a tiny energetic poof of flouncy dresses and multicolored ribbons; little sparkly Sayonara Pussycat band-aids glittering on her hands, from falling out of trees and punching playground bullies in the face.

On the other hand, parent-child discount day at the paintball place was fun. Incidentally, that Star played dirty. Weren’t she and Valerie friends?

He is never going to understand teenage girl friendships, and that’s just fine. He’s just eternally grateful that Valerie has friends, friends who she might maybe talk to about the things she just can’t discuss with her father.

Maybe he still worries more than is healthy, but – she’s his kid. He’s always going to be mildly terrified she’ll walk down the wrong blind alley someday and not walk back out; except that she can fly, so that exact outcome is vanishingly unlikely.

Damon crosses St. Charles Avenue a lot faster than usual. The sooner he’s home, the sooner he can warm up and try to get some sleep. Quick-cook oats and chamomile tea are his friends.

He needs to get some sleep and get his brain to stop going in circles, probably not in that exact order. He doesn’t work as many night shifts as he’d used to, no longer the new guy at the agency, but being a security guard is mostly long stretches of brain-draining tedium interspersed with the occasional heart attack. So, something like an introductory lecture class, really.

He turns left on Vellum Street, loops around past the eternal pile of garbage cans outside that one jerk’s house, and takes a right on Williamson.

His apartment is through a perpetually-broken gate, five minutes to check his mailbox and sort out the bills and a letter from Valerie from the junk. Then ten minutes to drag himself up four flights of stairs, another ten minutes to peel off his defensive outer layer of clothes, and start the water heating up in the little stovetop kettle.

He uses the bathroom, takes a shower, and puts on a clean set of sleeping clothes. Sweatpants and a World’s Best Dork hoodie don’t exactly qualify to be called pajamas. Tea goes on the counter to steep; water is poured over a bowl of oats, and covered up so it can cook.

He closes his eyes for a minute, and wakes up to the tea overdone and too bitter to drink. The oatmeal is cold, but edible. He re-boils the kettle, pours in a little hot water, and eats it anyway.

And then he finally, finally just lets himself fall into bed so he can do all this tomorrow, all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 20 July 2017 #danny phantom #world building week #fanfic #matsuri writes #unedited piece of crud #damon gray #valerie gray #OC #this came out more of a character study again #character study


	3. lighter when you turn it around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You’d think that knowing there’s an open door to some limitless hell-dimension would stop people moving here, but no.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for DP World Building Week 2017, Day 2: Mediums / Possession. Valerie POV, future fic loaded with headcanons and speculation. More character study than worldbuilding, really. Warnings for swearing, mentioned death, implied offscreen violence. Title from Rebecca Sugar’s “Everything Stays”.

The day after Valerie gets back to Amity Park, she goes apartment hunting.

She lucks out, winds up with a combined living / office space. It’s about five blocks from where Amity Park borders Elmerton, and it shows in the air quality. Also, graffiti.

Everything around the building is pretty much shit, to be honest, but at least the rent is within her budget. She had to beg Star for her help as it was, and that’s the only reason she’s got a flat rate. What else was she going to do? Ask Manson for a loan?

…well, honestly, that is an option now. It’s just not an option Valerie really wants to go with just yet. Being aware of her pride hasn’t made it go anywhere, just made her better at swallowing it when she’s really screwed things up.

Which she _hasn’t_ yet, not on this. So there.

Honestly, the first month and change is just a blur of meetings and reunions. Star and Paulina are engaged now, finally.

The Fenton-Manson soap opera is apparently on hold for the sake of Manson’s eco-business degree; and, to actually nobody’s surprise, Danny Fenton wound up taking over FentonWorks after all.

Well, sort of. Apparently his parents are getting a little old to go chasing after every blip on their sensor-net these days, so he’s been taking over more of the field work while his parents act as Mission Control.

His sister is at Yale, working on her doctorate. Shock.

Foley finished up at MIT, and is now working on a tech startup, which… is and isn’t _really_ surprising. The tech startup thing makes sense, but the biotech focus seems kind of out of left field.

…then again, with how disquietingly organic ghost tech looks, maybe not.

Valerie has found ghost sensors installed in every public security camera within Amity Park proper. A lot of places in Elmerton have them, too, which says interesting things on how far Amity Park’s weirdness is spilling over the town’s edges.

There’s been this weird sort of invisible, intangible – to humans – sort of curtain up all around Amity Park for years. Valerie can tell where it is, sort of. It feels like walking through cobwebs does to her – clingy and a little gross, but not really solid. The ghosts she’s actually spoken to (Phantom, Dani, and a few others who have never been here so they don’t count right now) have told her it’s like squeezing themselves through the holes in a net. More annoying than painful, but kind of tiring.

Watching Phantom dissolve himself and resolve on the other side of a bullshit-magical chainlink fence she _can’t see_ , even with all her suit’s sensors, will never not be spine-crawlingly weird.

Borders have power, they say. Thresholds, too. Ghosts don’t _need_ to be invited into people’s homes with actual words, but a gesture can work just as well: an unlocked gate, a window cracked open, or even just picking up the wrong random object without knowing who it belonged to last.

Gestures can keep ghosts out, too. Outdoor lights are getting more common in Amity Park, on buildings that have gone up in the last seven years or so. It took a little while for the message to sink in, in some places, but now construction has to be up to code for ghost resistance too, not just storms and fires and all that.

Valerie’s actual degree is in civil engineering, which is a big part of why she’s back here in Amity Park at all. No matter how ridiculously (impossibly) low the direct death rate from ghost fights is in this town – one random rubbernecker getting trampled by a panicked mob is _a bad year_ , no arguing – there’s always construction and repair work going on somewhere. New developments, even. You’d think that knowing there’s an open door to some limitless hell-dimension would stop people moving here, but no! Business is booming.

It’s partly down to the recession, she knows that. It’s harder and harder to find jobs now, and Amity Park is a good place for anyone with some shiny new bright idea for how to build a place up sturdy and cheap and in mass quantities.

It’s also a good place for scam artists, which is one of those areas where being six-foot-two and heavily muscled comes in handy. So’s being a young woman living alone in a lousy part of town, even if street crime has gone down since she was a kid in Elmerton.

Another upside of living five blocks from Elmerton is that it’s easy to get to her dad’s new apartment from here. He managed to get hired by an actual legitimate security company about five years ago, and then he worked his way up to a middle-management position. It’s nowhere near as much responsibility as his old security consultant jobs, and maybe a quarter of his old salary _if_ she counts bonuses; but there’s enough money coming in now that he can afford a pretty okay one-bedroom near the cluster of office buildings that passes for Elmerton’s financial district.

Compared to the shithole they’d been in a few years ago, Daddy’s new place is paradise. There’s even a sofabed that folds out in case of surprise visits by grown daughters who forgot to make arrangements for a place to stay while apartment hunting.

Valerie’s father is the best in the entire world, and she will actually fight anyone who tries to argue otherwise.

So in between reuniting with her dad, applying for any and every local job she might be qualified to do, and finding out the new shapes of old lost-and-found friendships – well, maybe she shouldn’t be all that surprised about forgetting about the ghost thing. It’s been a while, after all. Ghost-hunting’s taken a backseat to real life these last few years, re-teaching herself how to fight with the right words and the right clothes and a sheet of spotless references.

And it’s not that ghost-hunting doesn’t feel real to her, because it does. It’s more than that, better than real, the worst and best thing she’s ever experienced in her life. Even finals week, three project write-ups due and two morning exams the next day, could barely even come close to gazing into the abyss and shooting it in the face.

Two months in, she finishes moving her old stuff into her new apartment. It had taken longer than she’d thought it would; she doesn’t have a lot of physical possessions besides her clothes, her stash of anti-ghost weapons, and ten years of piled-up textbooks. She sets up the cot she’ll be sleeping on until further notice, kicks her shoes off, and passes out for the night.

The next day, she wakes up to an apartment full of glow-in-the-dark graffiti and the contents of her dresser drawer scattered all over the place. It takes about twenty minutes’ worth of poking things and fuming to figure out that the realtor was lying through their teeth when they had the building marked down as ‘Not Haunted’.

Valerie takes another minute to call and set Star on that idiot. Then maybe ten minutes to use the bathroom, brush her teeth and so on. Most ghosts didn’t know how humans could get poisoned, and she had a high tolerance for ecto-contamination anyway.

She wills her suit on.

The next day, she takes out an ad in the Amity Park Angle.

 **The Gray Line**  
Government Certified Paranormal Expert  
Negotiations, Cleansings, and Exorcisms  
Got Paranormal Problems? Here To Help

Fenton asks for proof, and she shoves the certificate at him. There’s an online course for it now, and it takes maybe 50 hours total. It’s called a work ethic.

Foley offers to whip up an electronic ad in exchange for buying him lunch for a week. Valerie doesn’t need Fenton pantomiming “no don’t do it” over Foley’s shoulder to know how dumb a deal that’d be. She counteroffers by pointing out the flat rate on his website, he counteroffers with a “friends discount” which is actually what it sounds like, and the whole thing just explodes right out of control inside a week.

Valerie can’t believe she actually missed this ridiculous, awful, ghost-clogged town.

Star calls her up at five in the morning and does nothing but giggle maniacally into the phone.

It’s another two months of telling herself tomorrow until Valerie admits she’s put down roots, again. She looks around at her office, _hers_ -

The half-a-million projects she’s got in progress, with Danny and Star and Foley and Jasmine and even freaking Manson. A half-full cabinet of archived case files, the current cases open on her computer. A hefty reference book, lying open with the spine up on her cot, waiting for her to have a spare minute or twelve to look up some obscure formula for the weapons-design collab with Mrs. Fenton.

New photographs, to go with the old: some views from interesting vantage points, some weird statue Manson was looking for, backups of legal documents, a pancake shaped like Mr. Lancer’s head. Her old friends from Casper, her new colleagues from the engineering program, her peers here and now.

There’s just one lonely selfie, tucked in between a current aerial view of Amity Park tinted night-vision green and an old picture of Mom and Dad, faded gray. She’s wearing her old suit, the first one, and holding a can of paint in her free hand. There are drop cloths over thirdhand-new furniture in the background.

Home is all warm colors now. Orange and yellow, white and brown, gray and gold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 18 July 2017 #danny phantom #world building week #fanfic #matsuri writes #unedited piece of crud #the tone is just all over the place here #this is clearly a rough draft #valerie gray #ensemble cas t#links to the revised version will be by later #and i'll fix the tags then too maybe #future fic #headcanon #speculation #amity park is weird


	4. a lack of anything inside

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every destination is here, if you keep going long enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for DP World Building Week 2017, Day 6: Life / Death. Dani POV, ft. an OC. Tie-in, following “a swirling-in-on-itself”. Warnings for body horror, something like a hostage situation, a brief instance of self-harm as coping mechanism, disassociation, Dani’s SF species identity issues, and [SPOILER]. Angst. Seriously, I think this may qualify for phantomrose96 or Cordria levels of angst towards the end.

By now she isn’t too surprised when she falls asleep in a hollow tree stump, hoping for shelter and seeking shade, and then wakes up in the Ghost Zone. Again.

Sleeping-time, she’s figured out, is somehow even more dangerous than she’d thought it was. At first, she’d chalked up her insomnia to hypervigilance and the over-awareness that Vlad’s minions were actually freaking everywhere. Then she’d noticed that if she went to sleep without enough caloric fuel and trace vitamins in her body, she usually woke up melting a little around the edges. Human bodies are programmed to heal most efficiently during sleep, but healing takes resources she just doesn’t have.

And then she finally figured out that if falling asleep relaxed the frantic grip her waking mind kept on the human world, then actually sleeping for more than minutes at a time just… kind of let the constant undertow of the Ghost Zone drag her down. Dani was a ghost, she’d been created as a ghost, and the Ghost Zone wanted her back. Sure, Danny was pretty much the same as she was structurally-speaking; but he actually had concrete, tangible things anchoring him to his life in the human world. A home, a family, friends. A mission, however self-imposed.

Dani didn’t actually have any way to test out either of these hypotheses. But she hadn’t stumbled over anything that disproved them yet, so they worked fine for now.

Right now, the problem is that as soon as she wakes up, she stops drifting. And even to get to the Ghost Zone from Earth, you need a portal.

Any portal, honestly – time and place and cause-and-effect all run into each other like wet paint here, clump and dry and make geometrically-nonsensical shapes that fall apart at the brush of a hand like cobweb clouds. Getting into the Ghost Zone, the strange space between physical places, is easy like falling.

Dani doesn’t know why it is that she just happens to drop into the Ghost Zone when she sleeps deeply.

Maybe her half-ghost-ness makes her want to be here, and the all-over sagging heaviness of her human body and brain needing sleep gets subconsciously mixed up with the inevitable gravity of the Ghost Zone. Every destination is here, if you keep going long enough.

Hell, maybe she’s just a wimp who can’t keep enough of a grip on physical reality that she just fades into the Ghost Zone when she stops to rest, like all those other little ghosts too weak to hold up a stable physical form.

Or maybe she’s just unlucky and super-prone to finding natural portals by accident. However the why of it works, the end result is always the same:

Dani, lost and drifting aimlessly through every kind of horrible thing to ever exist, collected in the universe’s eternal trash dump. Yeah, this is home, all right.

She swings her body like she’s tipping backwards in a folding chair, letting the reactive centrifugal force drag her away from a randomly drifting flower-covered rock-thing. If there’s any lesson she didn’t need the Ghost Zone to learn, it was to beware all things shiny and bright and openly inviting. At least normal ghosts _tell_ you when they want to destroy you. Most will even explain exactly how they’re going to do it, which is really helpful for things like out-sneakying them and escaping.

Dani doesn’t understand the reasoning behind giving up when someone wants to kill you. She’s alive now. Barely alive, sure, but she still counts! And even if she doesn’t – well, she still exists. Dani would really really prefer to keep on existing for as long as she can scrape together another few seconds of _anything_ out of reality.

And if that means hiding under a rock like some tiny squishable bug (or even hiding from a rock) then that’s totally one-hundred-percent a-okay in her book. She is totally up for a fight honestly, but just not the ones she has literally zero chance of winning.

Which is probably why she’s not trying too hard to get out of the Ghost Zone right now, not just yet. This isn’t one of the more stable parts, anyway – there’s not enough difference between claws and cliffs in this bit for actually walking to work, and forget climbing.

Floating isn’t so bad, except for the complete lack of control where she’s going. She could transform and move around as a ghost, impulse defining motion without any of the messy translations or stopovers of bones and muscles and nerves. Bodies are so heavy.

But, well… not having much control doesn’t matter when she has absolutely no idea where she is, beyond _where the fuck is this?_

And just like that, inside a half-hour or a millisecond of having had that thought, Dani pops out of the muck-forest and finds herself in some more-clearly-definable space. There’s already an up and a down she can feel tugging her contained-fluid bits in some direction that is some way, not just an arbitrary _down is where my feet are, maybe_ label she has to use so her 3D-wired human brain won’t just glitch out entirely and stop processing sensory input.

There aren’t a lot of things more awful than having perfectly good information coming in from her nerves and not being able to use any. Apparently, it’s completely normal and expected that when placed under chronic stress, she’ll inevitably hit some unchangeable limit of conscious awareness. And then the complex-logical-thought parts of her brain just won’t work, not until she’s had enough time and rest to get back up to some minimum standard of _yes, this is enough, let’s restore basic functionality beyond vital functions like diaphragm contraction and neuron activation and exhalation_ – and then, she’ll snap out of it and realize she’s been hiding in a literal hole in the ground like some kind of demented squirrel or something. Her subconscious thinks holes in the ground are comforting for some reason.

Dani refuses to examine that thought any closer. She doesn’t really have to, and she doesn’t all that much want to, so she really isn’t going to. It really is that simple.

Down, here, means toward the anchorless street segment floating in the ectoplasm. Dani half-heartedly fights the pull of the nice solid ground for a bit. But really she’s tired, and it really does look just like some nothing-special asphalt and concrete, snapped up and lifted out of any random modern-day city and plopped down in the middle of literal nowhere.

Dani’s not holding out a lot of hope that the ghost who made this place is going to be reasonable about her being here, but if she just can take a few subjective minutes to orient herself and just decide which way _back_ could be-

Not _back_ as in the physical direction, ‘cause that means jackall nothing here. _Back_ , as which way to go so she’ll end up around the same time and place she was last in the human world.

 _On Earth_ is a good start, really. It’s pretty much her baseline for _not totally lost beyond all hope of living to see tomorrow_. But there’s also _the early twenty-first century by the Gregorian calendar_ , and maybe even sometime in fall 2013 – because technically it might have been winter when she left off, but unless she comes out somewhere not in the northern Midwestern United States, she’d really rather start September all over than deal with December.

Ugh. Dani buries her face in her arms, curling down and into a ball. She’s not really sure why her human bits like being in this position so much. It lets her hide what her hands are doing, so it’s not totally pointless, but – why isn’t there even one position that doesn’t leave some vital point open to getting hit?

A staticky charge ripples through the ground she’s standing on, and Dani cracks her eyes open behind her hands. She’s careful to keep power from leaking out, keep her eyes dim so she won’t look like a threat. A ghost humanlike enough that their place-memories default to _city street_ will probably know what a human is, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be lucid enough to realize how squishy she is. Hopefully.

“Hey. You, kid.”

The voice is new, the first she’s heard except her own – safely silent, in her head – for at least a day or so.

Dani’s gone longer without saying anything and been absolutely totally super-okay with it, but that was always on Earth. The emptyish unformed border-spaces in the Ghost Zone are all so completely quiet, it’s like she’s submerged in lack-of-sound. Her ghost-ness is fine with it, but human brains need words like their bodies need water. She can’t live on just silence, her own words aren’t enough, and-

The new voice is, paradoxically, warm. Sharp and staticky, like a cell-phone signal through layers of metal. This new presence, unknown but – not unknown? Not new. Lightning and neon, and the way ecto-radiation shines back off glass and steel. Sunset colors and coal-hot darkness, and for a blink’s-length Dani remembers the deep cold of a needle deep in her side. The actually literally indescribable experience of being revived.

Dani knows what she’ll see before she sees it. Them.

A backdrop of broken-buildings, broken-off beams and brick-dust and the off-angles of walls with no support to hold them up but their own ruins. A strong enough domain, no matter how small it is, that the sky here and the light are sundeath red. Thick tangles of exposed wiring that never connected up to anything draw her line of sight back up to-

Them. Her?

The empty armor – the faceplate’s down, but translucent enough to expose a lack of anything inside, just two red streaks for eyes – tilts its head. The stilted movements of a ghost that can’t remember how living bodies work, but going through the motions because they’re literally programmed in at the moment of formation.

“You. Who are,” brief pause. “You… uh. What are you?”

Dani bites the inside of her cheek, hard enough to sting a lot and probably start bleeding. She must not give in to the urge to fall over fear-laughing. “Hi! I’m Dani, and I’m absolutely harmless.”

The ghost, because what else would it be, straightens up and materializes weapons out of the red air. The nails-on-a-chalkboard whine of charging ecto-guns is kind of hilariously familiar. “That is false. Harmless entities do not live in the Ghost Zone.”

“I don’t live here!” she chirps, not quite gagging on fear. “I mean, sometimes I end up here anyways, but I actually live in the human world. I’m from there.”

All true, in the strictly literal sense.

A beat, ringing silence.

“True.”

Oh frick-a-fraggling heckshitty-doo, of course this ghost has a built-in lie detector ability. Of course. “Yep. Just looking to go back to the human world, that’s all.”

And then she is in shackles. Handcuffs and ankle-cuffs, and thick bands holding her arms bound to her torso, knees and thighs clamped together. She has a few desperate seconds to be really glad there’s nothing around her neck or over her face before the ghost takes off, dragging her along with about zero effort.

She gets a clear top view of the lair on the way out to _away from here_ , a classic twenty-first-century ruinscape that’s way too familiar from dystopian disaster movies, and then the thick red dust-cloud sky. She sees clearly, now, how the devouring forest gives this ghost’s lair a very clear personal-space-bubble or else.

Or else _her_ \- the memory of her, the-

She never actually really wanted to really know why it was that humans thought ghosts were creepy and terrible. It’s not even that ghosts are unnatural, because they’re not. We-they are not. They happen all the damn time. They’re made by _dying_ , and then getting up anyway. What’s more natural, more human, than that?

No. No no, no no no. It’s the _looking at what used to be somebody you know and knowing exactly what would be left if they lost their self-ness_ that’s making you grind your teeth so hard they might crack, just so you won’t scream. Ha ha fuck, existential terror is awful. She’d really thought she were over it, but- guess not!

Dani breathes.

She breathes, and she breathes. Reminds herself that she can breathe. Somewhere in all this, her eyes are shut. It’ll be all right.

Her heart beating in her ears, and her fists clasped so tight her fingers are doing that tingling thing from lost circulation. Her eyes shut tight, breath coming up short.

These are, all of these awful sick-feeling miserable things, they all mean her human body is alive right now. Here, now, despite all reason, she exists. That’s a win. That is the inarguable root of all win ever.

She realizes they’ve stopped moving. She’s stopped, anyway. Maybe the ghost kept going and just stranded her somewhere on a whim. Classic ghost logic. The restraints have to disappear sometime, right?

“Search query result 'back to the human world’, located.”

Dani looks. She doesn’t even know why she’s surprised, that this ghost out of all of them knows where the Fenton Portal is located on either end. That’s one way to get around the unreliability of natural portals. In fact, this is as far as she knows the most reliable way back.

Dani scrapes up enough energy for a grin. “Thanks. Could you let me go, now? I promise I’ll leave as soon as the door opens.”

“No. Unsupervised human, response protocol: to be returned home. Remain until returned.”

No pronouns. Wow, that is absotively posi-bloodily a great sign.

Her face hurts from fear-smiling. “Okay then!”

Dani lets her eyes close and tries to just… hang there, and not think about where _there_ is. Rainbows and flowers and hills and meadows. Mount Edziza, Vermilion Falls, Yosemite Park.

Heckdamnit, brain.

And then she’s falling. She drops into a forward roll, springs up to her feet, and turns-

She’s in the basement lab. It’s dark except for spillover from the Portal, empty except for random lab equipment. Danny mentions that the portal door can malfunction sometimes, just open on its own even without something dumb happening like his dad leaving it open.

Dani has absolutely no idea if that’s what happened here. Right now, she wants _out_ , and there’s nothing stopping her so that’s where she goes to. Phase directly up through the less-warded ceiling, into the living room and phase again out through the walls.

Humans always reinforce thresholds and openings more than the actual structures they’re set into. And she’s sure she’s been more grateful for this overall tendency to lousy security, but she’s also sure that that particular memory is lost somewhere in the early-months haze of _everything happening all the time_ so much she couldn’t tell where up and down were, never mind remember what she’d been doing more than a few hours at a time then.

Dani transforms without a thought, forgetting all about bus stops and the money in her pocket and all that stuff about really really really needing to keep a low profile.

There’s a picture of Vlad up on a billboard, something something _Master of All Mayors_ , and she knows this means he’s probably got eyes on her right now and she doesn’t freaking care. She has to see. She has to know.

She hits the wall at the inside edge of Amity Park. She’s out of energy as soon as she’s dialed back down to human, falls down in a heap and lands on her knees, but it doesn’t matter. Dani needs to know. She’s known where her apartment is for almost four years in subjective time, since late spring of '08 in human time. She has to know.

She has to see Valerie for herself, know right now if- _she is alive_ -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 22 July 2017 #danny phantom #world building week #fanfic #matsuri writes #unedited piece of crud #dani #OC #see top of post for triggers #i swear this wasn't planned until today


	5. a part of this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She already was vaguely aware of it, in the way small-town kids through history have longed for the legendary big city, but Amity Park really is a tiny little excuse of a hometown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for DP World Building Week 2017, Day 7: Otherworldly. Tie-together of “a swirling-in-on-itself”, “lighter when you turn it around”, “daily and nightly, in little ways”, and “a lack of anything inside”. Future fic, character study, with ghost biology speculation and hurt/comfort + sickfic. Warnings: swearing, emetophobia, blood, blood in vomit, body horror, psychological horror, and some description of past child abuse / dehumanization / what Vlad did to Dani. Title from “Full Disclosure (I Don’t Want That For You)” by Rebecca Sugar ft. Zach Callison.

It isn’t planned, not until the last minute. But she’s already had plans to visit Dad over the break, and she can’t just leave her alone now – not when Dani’s been dropping in and out every day, staring at Valerie like she’s the one who keeps disappearing.

It’s bad enough when she's alone – Valerie’s used to the totally-not-staring thing that Dani does when she’s worried because of (or for) somebody else – but _something_ is eating at her enough that she forgets to act like a normal human, and that’s one of the scariest things Valerie’s seen in a while.

Not because Dani’s scary. Now _that_ would be ridiculous.

No, it’s how careless she’s being about not drawing bad attention – whether it’s from actually-malicious ghosts trawling for easy prey, or in-the-know human scumbags looking for a novelty to collect, or just plain old fearmongering asshats looking for Someone Different to pin all their hate on, Dani is always aware of anyone who might be a threat. It’s a good habit, honestly. Valerie approves of this. But it doesn’t work when Dani’s not paying attention to anything that’s not right in front of her, or even just the imaginary monsters that live in her own head. Hell knows Valerie’s been in that headspace, and it is in hindsight a shitty space for anybody’s head to be stuck in.

So when Dad called unexpectedly and she’d put him on speakerphone to free her hands up – again, a habit – and one subject had led up to another, she’d wound up asking if maybe she could bring a friend along to come visit for a day?

And that was how she’d gotten here:

Chicago Midway International airport, at damn-it’s-dark o'clock, looking around for a nice quiet poorly-lit spot with no security cameras watching.

*

”Are you sure you want to do this? Is it even close to safe?” she’d asked for probably the hundredth time that day, in full awareness that whatever Dani said, the actual answer to the second question was made of no.

Dani had rolled her eyes, the model picture of preteen exasperation at the scaredy-cat overcautiousness of an adult. For some reason, Dani’s persistently-tweenaged looks (and personality) look a lot younger from 19 than they did at 17. Maybe it was because she could vote now?

Nah.

“Valerie, first of all? Yes, I’m sure. I’m not even counting how expensive last-minute airline tickets have got to be, because everything’s ten times more expensive at the last minute, and neither of us have money – I don’t have papers, Valerie. I don’t have any kind of ID. Vlad never bothered to make me any, and I sure don’t have the connections to get convincing fake-anything made, never mind the ‘no money’ problem. I can’t take a plane, Valerie.”

She took a deep breath, swallowing down the familiar vitriol of _fuck Masters and every last fucking thing about his entire existence to hell, sincerely_. “And you can’t fly yourself, because you need to keep a low profile.”

Dani nodded. “Even if I didn’t, I still don’t have the energy to fly so far without help. If I had Ecto-Dejecto on me right now, maybe – but I’d still have to use those big gulf air-currents to get that far without tiring out. Even if my ghost form doesn’t weigh anything, I still get drag.”

Valerie knew that at this point, they were just repeating the same exact argument they’d had for the last few days for the sake of repeating it. Valerie had a sneaking suspicion that Dani also knew that, and knew that Valerie knew that she knew that, and was still humoring Valerie for reasons not all that distantly related to pity.

She rubbed her eyes with her hands, and instantly regretted it. She still had all sorts of dust and crap all over her hands from packing. Most of her clothes and bulky stuff were staying here, but she didn’t trust an empty dorm with her laptop. And she absolutely didn’t trust it with her weapons, but airport security would catch those so she’d have to stash them in her storage locker on campus and hope nobody tried to open it.

Dani waited out Valerie swearing and blinking dust out of her eyes with amused tolerance for her lack of a healing factor and/or insanely high pain threshold. “I really will be fine, I promise.”

“How sure are you of that?” she snapped, wiping dust off on her pant legs.

“Literally 100% sure. It was originally designed for the capture and retrieval of lab specimens, remember? Ghosts in the Fenton Thermos go into a low-energy state where consciousness is preserved and physical forms aren’t, and my physical form is the biggest passive energy drain when I’m a ghost. I’ll go in, go to sort-of-sleep for a while, and wake up feeling like I’ve lost a little time.” She shrugged. “No big deal.”

“But-” _What if you get hurt by it? Hell, what if you fall apart?_

Dani propped a hand on her hip and raised her right hand up for silence. “I’ve done this before.”

…what.

“Vlad used to put me in one when I got underfoot, and that was before I got the Ecto-Dejecto thing figured out.”

Valerie could not even begin to describe all the things that were wrong in that sentence.

Naturally, Dani pushed recklessly onwards, like she hadn’t just said that. “Worst case, you let me out and I end up needing a booster shot – in which case I can literally just go a few miles up to the Fentons’ place and get some. There was still a big tub of it in the basement last time Danny checked, and that was like a month ago local time. You know they’re total pack rats when it comes to old lab equipment.”

Yeah. Yeah, that was something that sounded true. Maybe it even was true, Dani didn’t really like lying to people she actually trusted a little.

None of that made this any better.

*

Finally, Valerie found a spot that looked safe enough – no easily-visible windows facing her, enough of an overhang that she wouldn’t be seen from directly above, and nobody around but one sleepy-looking security guard and a couple of people yelling at their phones. Perfect, the commotion should help her slide out of anyone else’s memory.

She digs a lighter out – a flimsy excuse for sudden light, but people will take anything over 'the supernatural is real, it’s weird, and it’s floating right next to you’ given the chance – and then her Thermos. The little panel tracking occupancy still says 1. Dani hadn’t made a peep through the whole flight, not even through an hour-and-a-half delay before the plane was ready.

Valerie is absolutely ready to freak out now, but that would draw a lot more attention than either her or Dani could afford, so she just makes herself keep taking deep breaths in a steady rhythm. She’s been playing sports since she was in kindergarten, she can damn well pace herself.

She waits, times it for when the guard is coming up to Yelling Person #2 to tell them whatever-

She hits the release button. There’s a sound like steam escaping an over-boiling pot, and then actual steam that turns into a girl who wobbles on her feet and darn near falls over.

Valerie throws her jacket on over her and flips the hood up, blocking out the light. With Dani’s eyes hidden, and the morning light washing out her internal glowlamp effect, she just looks like some kid in a Danny Phantom costume – a little weird to see at an airport, maybe, but not illegal.

Still, better to get moving before someone sees her and maybe takes a picture of the 'Phantom cosplayer’, posts it to the internet, and gets who-knows-who on Dani’s tail. It’s honestly entirely possible that Valerie has put way too much thought into this trip, but she’s seen the Z-Men movie. More importantly, she’s seen the lab Dani was almost unmade in, and that is never ever going to be happening again.

Dani drops out of ghost form somewhere in the crush between Valerie casually going back into the terminal to find a bathroom – because now that she knows Dani’s not dead and not going to vanish in the next few seconds, she really has to use one – and actually finding the nearest facility.

She leaves a very safely human-looking Dani to watch her luggage. Dani plops down on the duffel bag like it’s a bench. This would be a lot more adorable if she didn’t look horrifically exhausted and five seconds from falling over.

“Five minutes,” she yells over her shoulder, and taps her foot for every wasted second she loses waiting in fucking line for all these slow-ass idiots dragging their feet while the kid needs rest and food and sleep. And, shit, Dani might want to go now because there’s still another few hours of traveling and the train station’s not going to be any better.

Dani does also need a turn in the bathroom. Dani would also like some water and something to eat, please. “But something light, okay? Like oatmeal or plain rice.”

She doesn’t explain hers, and Valerie doesn’t ask. There’s a lot of reasons Dani’s face could be looking greenish, starting with being grossed out by airport bathrooms.

Valerie gets her a water bottle and a granola bar, in a rush to get out of the terminal. “Sorry, sweetie, but we’ve gotta go or I’ll miss my train.”

“I thought you had two hours’ leeway?” she says around a cheekful of granola bar. She looks like a cartoon chipmunk.

“That was before the damn flight got delayed.”

They make it on the bus that goes to the train station, barely. Dani falls asleep, curling into Valerie’s side, and she has to force herself to stay awake by running combat simulations and reviewing last week’s lesson on logarithms in her head.

She hasn’t been able to sleep on a plane she started flying without one, gotten too aware of the way the air pressure plunges and the air temperature goes down to actually frickin’ freezing. Buses and trains don’t cause that problem, but Dani is smaller and younger and needs the rest more. Plus this way she can ask Dani to watch her stuff while she naps on the train. Not traveling alone has advantages.

Unlike the whole mess with the plane ticket, Valerie can just buy extra train ticket at the station.

Dani’s woken up enough by then to make sad-tired-puppy eyes at the old guy at the ticket counter, so it’s absolutely no effort to get her a child ticket. He barely even looks at the terrible fake ID Valerie had commissioned a few days ago. She’d be more worried about the favors she owes now, if she didn’t actually trust Manson and Foley to not push her limits. Mostly. They’re still way too careless and trusting around ghosts.

The train ride is a train ride. Valerie finds two seats next to each other near a window, facing the end of the train car so they have a little bit of privacy. Unfortunately, this means they’re sitting backwards the whole way, but at least they’re right by each other in case of some emergency.

It turns out that Dani gets train-sick.

“How did you not know that you get motion sickness?” Valerie asks, holding Dani’s hair up with her left hand and awkwardly rubbing along her back with the other.

“Never been on a-” she burps. “-train before. Or anything else bigger'n a regular car, and those were never really long trips.”

The guy who’d sat next to Dani earlier had left as soon as she’d asked the conductor where are the sick bags, which at least meant she didn’t have to worry about someone noticing the way Dani’s skin looked a lot greener than was humanly possible. Also, Valerie is silently screaming her head off right now.

Valerie sighs. “Don’t you travel everywhere?”

Dani looks up. “I walk,” she says emphatically. “Or I fly, a little. I don’t-”

She waves at the air for a second, then goes back to leaning over the sick bag. “I don’t take trains, or transportation. I stowed away on a ship once, but I slept the whole way. I never have money.”

In her head, Valerie understands logically that Dani is really no better or worse off than every other homeless kid ever. In her heart, she wants to personally find each and every person who has ever looked through Dani and treated her as less-than-human for a reason as stupid as not having enough money on hand, and personally punch them all right in their smug-ass faces.

It’s just that Valerie is right up on Spot #2 on that list, so that plan might be a little bit more difficult in its execution.

So instead, she murmurs meaningless comforting things and holds Dani until she’s too tired to keep puking - or just doesn’t have anything else to bring up, either way.

There are splotches of too-bright red and even-brighter green mixed in with the vomit, standing out like targets.

Valerie has to ask. “I know this is kind of a dumb question, but… how bad is it that there’s, uh, blood in your vomit?”

She’s aware that the answer would be an automatic 'very bad, go to a hospital right now’ under normal circumstances, but these aren’t those circumstances.

Dani shifts minutely in the crook of Valerie’s arm. “I don’t think it’s that bad? Happens sometimes, when I’m really tired and I haven’t eaten enough lately.”

Valerie nods. “Too much stress on an empty stomach, that makes sense. …wait, you ate just now.”

“Yeah, and then I puked it back up.”

Valerie lets herself relax a little. Maybe she can afford a quick nap after all.

“Unless it’s all dried up and black, that means something deeper in is bleeding.”

…never-for-fucking-mind, she’s not sleeping any time today. “Why would you tell me that?”

“So you’ll know if it happens,” Dani mutters tiredly. “You asked.”

Valerie breathes, blocking out the combined smell of vomit and ectoplasm. They were not a good mix, and it was a good thing she hadn’t eaten much, either. “I did ask. …is there any?”

“You look.”

Valerie looks. “…nope, just red and. Uh. Green, a little.”

Dani says something that’s probably cursing, but Valerie doesn’t recognize the language.

“What was that.”

“Portuguese, Tagalog, and a little Russian.”

Valerie frowns at the top of Dani’s head.

She can’t see the little shit’s face, but she’s sure she’s smirking. “Hey, it’s got a lot of good curses.”

“And the fact that he curses in G-rated pastry names is irrelevant here.”

“Abso… ugh, too tired for big words. Yes, though. He’s old and mean and stupid. And swearing helps me feel better when I’m sick, so.”

“Well, I’m the last person to tell you not to. Try to keep it PG-13 at my dad’s place, though? I’m pretty sure he still thinks I’m the seven-year-old who wanted to go to karate class in a princess costume.”

Dani snickers. “Wow. Did you have a tiara?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “It was gold-colored plastic, and it had little plastic jewels in it. I think they were pink or something.”

Dani hums, and Valerie goes on. “I can’t really remember it, but Dad says I used to try to wear that thing everywhere. I’d take it off like once a week so the maid could wash it-”

“Ooh, the maid. Fancy.”

“Shut up. And Mom had to fix my hair up every morning so the stupid dinky tiara would stay in, and it was literally just a plastic circle, so that didn’t work out well…”

Before Valerie knows it, they pull into the single solitary train station in what passes for 'downtown’ Amity Park. She already was vaguely aware of it, in the way small-town kids through history have longed for the legendary big city, but Amity Park really is a tiny little excuse of a hometown.

She sighs and gets up. Her right leg is asleep, probably from Dani lying on it but possibly just from sitting down wrong. She’ll have to walk it off quick, she’s got to get her phone out of her bag so she can call a damn taxi and go home already-

“Dani, the fuck?” she blurts out before she can remember to not swear around little kids. Weird ambiguously-tweenaged ghost kids who look little, whatever.

She phases her hand back in through the window, looking even paler and shakier than she had been a minute ago. “What? I had to ditch the evidence somehow.”

“Out the window? And what if somebody saw you?”

“First of all, you should know how happy most people are to ignore things that aren’t their business.”

…true.

“Second, normally I’d be all over safe and ethical bio-waste disposal, but this is Amity Park. The soil is so ecto-contaminated by now, you can still see the town at night during a total power outage. I’ve seen pictures.”

Valerie scowls, because that’s also true.

“And third off, this was the easiest way to ditch the evidence.”

“Not the toilet?”

Dani shudders. “And deal with that smell? I’d just start throwing up again, and next it’d be my stomach lining.”

Valerie resolves to not ask whether or not she means that literally, or if she learned that from experience. There are some things about ghosts she neither needs nor wants to know.

Dani smirks like she knows what Valerie was just thinking. It’s probably not that hard to guess, with a leading statement like that.

Valerie hefts her bag up on her shoulder, very much looking forward to this day being over and done with. “So, are you going to need carrying?”

Dani sticks her nose up in the air. “Nah, I can walk.”

So Valerie calls a cab-

“We’re not going on the bus?”

“Do you want to deal with any more public transportation right now? Because I’m more than ready to start kicking asses, and I’d rather not be tempted.”

“Yeah…” Dani frowns, her eyes glazing over in thought. “For starters, who do you know who _could_ post bail?”

“Star,” Valerie says without a moment’s hesitation. “I’d pay through the nose for it later, but she’d get me out. And I guess Manson could pay it, I don’t know if she’d bother.”

Dani at her quizzically. “You guys are friends now?”

“'Friends’ is way too strong a word there. But allies, sure.”

“Good.” Dani smiles. It looks a hell of a lot realer than the ones from earlier.

-and they go down to the street. Then they have to find the right cab, which Valerie freely admits Dani is a lot more help with than she is.

Valerie is about 45% asleep now, and the number is climbing.

She definitely falls asleep on the cab ride. One arm over her bag so it won’t get stolen, and the other arm over Dani so she won’t get lonely.

Dani is probably the one who wakes her up, because nobody’s got any ecto-guns pointed at them when she’s mostly lucid again. Valerie has weird reflexes, okay.

The forty-eight dollars she has to pay the cab driver are agony. The five-dollar tip, because she knows exactly how much money people in service jobs don’t make, is just the stink icing on the shit sundae. The two-block walk to her dad’s place, from the corner of Vellum and Williamson where she told the driver to drop her off because she is a paranoid bitch sometimes, is the final nail in the coffin of not getting a migraine today. Fuck each and every thing.

Valerie’s not sure what the look is on her face when some smart-ass tries to steal her bag, but she’s pretty sure Dani’s interference saved somebody’s life and it wasn’t either of theirs.

Valerie gets a wider personal space bubble right after that. Good.

She doesn’t bother with digging out her old building keys or messing around with the intercom. She just jostles the gate until it shakes loose; her body remembers the motion, mostly to the right and up, and then the latch comes open and she’s free to zombie-stumble through the door and across the cramped dingy lobby like the actual literal horror-movie monster she is.

Well, 'vengeful cyborg powered by bullcrap ghost-magic’ sure sounds like a movie monster to her.

“…you’re not a monster.”

“Tha’s swee’, Dani.” The last word, her friend’s name, is reshaped around a loud yawn. She’s crashing.

The next few minutes go about the same way. Through the door, up the stairs. More stairs. So damn many stairs, how could she have forgotten all these damn stupid staircases.

“…okay, how did you not fall just now?”

“I,” Valerie says, not entirely sure how she came to be balanced on one hand. “Am a master martial artist.”

“Uh huh.”

…still more stairs. Then another door, then a cramped dingy hallway and the décor doesn’t even match the cramped dingy lobby, and then she gets to apartment 44.

“There’s 44 apartments here?”

“S'just by floor number.”

Damn useless door won’t open.

Dani holds her hand up. “I can get it, if it’s okay?”

Valerie says sure, go ahead, or something along those lines. She must have handed her the keys, because her next clear awareness of reality is in the little living room. It looks exactly the same. Same dinged-up old table, same shitty old TV set, same sad old hat and jacket hung up on the back of a chair ever since the old coat-hooks got knocked off the wall. Damn old ghosts.

“You sound like a cranky old person.”

Valerie raises her hand just long enough to flip Dani off on her way down the hall. Her old room is exactly the same. Dad must have even vacuumed sometime in the last month, since there’s only a little dust piled up around the edges.

Valerie drops her bag, topples over on the bed, and sleeps.

*

Awakeness comes on slowly, in pieces. The feel of scratchy sheets, dust in her nose, itchy sleep-gunk in her eyes. The scent-memory of aged instant coffee, spilled on her desk and soaked into the gray-painted plywood.

Valerie shoves herself up off the bed – her old bed, in her old room, and when had this crappy little place become in any way _home_ in her thoughts? She shuffles around, shedding clothing, reminding herself of what she has to do now.

She sniffs. Ugh, okay first what she needs is to get clean.

Half an hour or so later, she gets out of the shower and feels much more human. The orange sweater she throws on over her sports bra and sorta-white sweatpants is honestly eye-gouging, but she’s not planning on going anywhere in it. That, and it was the first clean item of clothing she’d found.

Valerie’s pulling her hair back in a scrunchie so she can start on breakfast when she walks into the kitchenette and realizes that she’s way too late. As in, her dad and Dani are sitting at the table sharing buttered toast, watery tea, and what looks like the morning paper.

Dani is reading the Sunday funnies. Valerie can tell, because that’s the only day of the week the comics are in color.

That’s probably because it is Sunday today.

Dani and Dad are sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper together.

She must have said something out loud, because they both look at her at the same time. Dad actually puts his paper down, folds it and puts it away like the conscientious old fuddy-duddy he is. Dani, again, is back to doing that 'not looking at you over the top of whatever I’m reading’ thing she does when she’s only halfway trying to be sneaky. Well, it’s nice to know that some things around here are still ...whatever passes for normal in this town.

“Morning,” she says. She’s not so sure what her voice is doing. She really needs coffee.

“Good morning, Valerie,” her dad says.

His face and his body language all agree with the impression his voice is giving; that is, that he is entirely calm, he is being entirely reasonable, and that he is in fact thinking things that aren’t miles-high neon-lit question marks right at this moment. Valerie knows that this is a complete big fat lie, because she does the same exact thing. She just defaults to rage instead of politeness. This probably explains why her dad has better luck with staying at jobs than she does.

Valerie can’t quite see it, but she’s a hundred percent sure that Dani is rolling her eyes at this entire situation. “Morning, Daddy. Morning, Dani.”

“You said that already, smartypants.” Dani doesn’t even lower the comics pages to say this.

“Put those down or surrender your toast, you little smart-alec.”

“Hell no,” says Dani. Then she does put the comics down and start eating, because what had Valerie even expected.

“Dani, do not swear around my dad,” Valerie says, scolding.

“Miss, please don’t swear at the table,” Dad says, reasonably.

They pause and stare at each other.

Valerie grins.

Dad returns it; a lot smaller but softer, but equally as bright.

Then Valerie goes to dig through the cabinets. The instant coffee is way back at the back of everything, same as it always is when she hasn’t been home for more than a day.

The outside is dusty, but it’s instant coffee, so. It’s not like this stuff can spoil. Valerie’s pretty sure the contents of this plastic jar would outlive her, if she wasn’t planning on using up as much of it as she could in the next few hours.

She pours herself a mug, two teaspoons and some boiled water from the kettle, and sits down at the table.

Silence. _Coffee_. Ahh.

“I thought the 'not awake until after caffeine’ thing was a myth. Like, a TV thing.” Dani’s watching her. How totally unexpected.

Valerie raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

Dani shrugs. “Nobody I’ve stayed the night with before did that. Your dad wasn’t even mad that you ignored him.”

“I’d be a hypocrite if I did, considering I used to be even worse,” Dad tells her. “Does anyone have any plans for today?”

Valerie groans. “Daddy, can you please let me wake up first?”

“Now you know how I feel,” Dani quips.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Valerie questions.

“That you’re a really bossy person.”

She could argue that. She really could. But then she’d lose the argument, so instead she just sips her coffee and watches Dani right back.

Then she has to swallow her mouthful of hot coffee really fast or risk choking on it. From laughter. “Aww, is that my old Sayonara Pussycat jacket?”

“Yes,” Dani says with zero trace of shame. “Your dad said I could have it, since my hoodie had throw-up on it and it smelled.”

Valerie looks at him.

“I did a load of laundry before I went to bed last night.” He shrugs and looks rueful. “It was my own fault for putting off the coats so long, I suppose. And anyway, a little extra-strength stain remover fixed that overshirt right up.”

She sighs. “It’s called a hoodie, Dad. I know they had those when you were my age.”

He looks wide-eyed at her for a second, then goes back to his tea and toast.

Valerie rolls her eyes. Bad enough she’s surrounded by comedians, but she is not dealing with this before food and coffee.

Three large mugs of coffee and two pieces of well-buttered toast later, Valerie is ready for actual person-to-person face-to-face communication. “So, uh. What happened last night after I crashed out, anyway?”

“…not much?” Dani says. “You pretty much passed out, so I sat next to you and waited until somebody showed up. Your dad talked to me a little-”

“She interrogated me,” he interjects, looking and sounding so completely unworried that Valerie might actually believe that he isn’t worried. “It was very terrifying.”

Dani sicks her tongue out at him – crossing her eyes, too, because she can.

Valerie kicks her under the table. If this is a sneak preview of what the next week or so is going to be like, she’s feeling tired again already. The _safe_ tired, though, the one that means she knows she’ll still wake up tomorrow because someone right here and real is going to watch her back now.

She isn’t sure why it happens when she starts laughing, just that she doesn’t want this to stop happening. She wants to keep this moment, bright and warm, faded-edged; this and new ones and even warmer, for as long as she possibly can.

Dani looks bright and warm and healthy, or as healthy as she ever looks, in Dad’s cluttered living room. Dad looks like he’s just been snapped awake from a long and unpleasant dream, worn and grateful in the same measure.

Valerie has no idea how she must look right now, with her hair half-up in a scrunchie and this awful disaster of a grapefruit-colored fuzzy sweater on. This day is already so many many kinds of better than yesterday was, she can’t ever count them all. All she can feel – all she has room to feel right now, around the stubborn pebble of confusion still clogging up her voice – is that she is so so so happy to be alive, and here, and now.

Just for a little longer, just for a few minutes. For years, for hours, forever, please, let this last. Just let them all be a part of this, just for a lifetime longer.

Too soon, the moment ends. The conversation breaks down into the daily-life minutiae of being a real grown-up person with grown-up responsibilities, and Valerie has to help with post-breakfast clean-up and avoid talking to Dad and get out some of her old clothes for Dani to wear.

She unpacks a little while Dani showers, just some day-to-day stuff like deodorant and her cell phone charger and that little lipstick gun she had in case of emergency. She’s never really unarmed, but it just feels safer having a backup weapon at all times.

Dad corners her while Dani’s busy trying to get a brush through her hair. “Valerie?”

“Yeah?” she says, not quite looking at him.

“Is she all right?”

She looks at him.

He frowns, dadly concern written all over his face in broad marker-strokes. “Really?”

 _That bad?_ he doesn’t say, and he doesn’t have to say for her to know that he’s saying it. They’d drifted, a lot, when she was in high school. Valerie is mature enough now to admit that a lot of that was on her – not all, maybe, some of it was just down to the shitty circumstances – but that doesn’t make nearly four years’ worth of habitual secret-keeping and resentment disappear. She doesn’t want it to stay like this, though. She wants to be a family, or at least try again. She doesn’t want to come back one day and find out she doesn’t know this man who was her Daddy at all.

She can’t go back, either. And she has absolutely no idea how to move on from here, so she and Dad are just… both stuck in this awkward limbo of trying and failing to reconnect, again and again. If she’s feeling really honest, she’ll admit that it’s Dad who does most of the trying.

There’s a part of her that can’t believe he’s still at it. Valerie’s pretty sure it’s the same as the part that took one stupid accident and turned it into a years-long crusade against an entire plane of existence, though. Maybe she should tell it to shut up more often.

She takes a breath. “Dad, I can’t tell you the whole story. I mean it, I cannot. First of all, it’s not my story.”

Actually, 'first of all’ is that she’s a supervillain’s escaped lab experiment and if you know too much he’ll try to disappear you. Which isn’t even getting into the whole 'I used to work for him’ and 'I almost let him kill Dani because I didn’t want to admit she was a person’ parts of that whole story. Or the fact that he’s almost definitely got some way to kill you if I ever try to fight him directly, or that I can’t even try because he’d squish me. Fuck.

Since Dad can’t hear any of her freaked-out internal monologue, he just does that solemn nod thing in response to the part she actually said.

“All right, that’s fair. Just-” he cuts himself off, pulls out his wallet and flips it open. He digs through the business card pockets for a few seconds. “This is the number of a national crisis hotline for people trying to escape domestic abuse. Age, race, gender, financial status, never mind – if she calls, they’ll at least try to help.”

Sometimes Valerie forgets that her parents had worked with the police, in another life. That Mom had been a bleeding heart extraordinaire, and wasn’t ever ashamed of it.

Dad holds up another card. “This one is a suicide-risk hotline. Someone can call for themselves, or for advice on someone else’s behalf.”

Valerie tries really hard to not laugh. She’s not sure what her face is doing. That’s literally the inverse and opposite of Dani’s problems on so many levels, except of course she can’t tell him that.

She takes the cards. “Thanks, Dad.”

He folds up his wallet and tucks it away in his pants pocket. “Just make sure she gets those, all right? It’s up to you whether or not you think she’ll respond well to knowing who gave those to you, and why, but I’m trusting your judgement on this.”

And all in a second, it hits her. Dad thinks that Dani is an ordinary human child, that she’s running from a shitty stepdad or an abusive uncle or the soccer mom from hell, not the actual supervillain who runs half the damn planet in one way or another. There’s no help-line for that.

 _Witness Protection_ , she thinks, except _what protection_ when he might as well own the courts? When he bankrolls entire departments of the US government? When the witness in need of protection has no legal identity or citizenship, and Dani’s never actually said so but Valerie’s pretty sure that’s because he literally made her in one of his secret mad-scientist labs.

Valerie isn’t fourteen now. She’s not even seventeen, and that’s probably a big part of why she successfully drags herself out of the riptide of slowly-exploding anger and redredredRED that swells up in her for a long few seconds. She can’t lose her temper here, not like that. Not at Dad, and not at Dani. Not at anyone she wants to survive it.

The downside of spending most of her teen years trying really hard to be a good weapon, she figures, is that now she really is a very good weapon.

By the time Dani gives up on fighting the hairbrush and wanders back out into the living room, Valerie has her searingboiling anger cleanly compartmentalized away. If she can work for years in a series of banal retail and service jobs without ever popping any of her customers one in the nose, then she can absolutely manage to not scare the daylights out of her friends and family. She had damn well better.

Dani looks at Valerie like she’s a puzzle someone’s put together just a bit wrong. “Are you okay?”

Instead of screaming, Valerie raises an eyebrow. “You’re asking me that question?”

Dani huffs. “It’s called being polite, I think. You should try it.”

“Here’s an idea, why don’t I try to kick your scrawny butt across the room-”

Dani takes off, and Valerie mock-chases her around for a few minutes. Somehow, this morphs into a game of _the floor is lava_ , which also doesn’t last long because there are only three sturdy-enough pieces of furniture in here. One of them is the tiny beat-up couch, which is swiftly taken on both sides. Another one is the TV stand, which has the TV on it, and then the table which is too far to jump to without powers.

Dad walks in somewhere between the ignoble end of _I Spy_ and another go-round of _rock, paper, scissors_. He’s wearing khakis, a button-up and a tie. On a weekend. “So, _do_ either of you have any plans for today?”

Dani looks at Dad, then back to Valerie, then back at Dad again. And shrugs. “I guess? I was just vaguely thinking sightseeing.”

Dad nods. “Sightseeing could work. Is there any particular neighborhood you'd like to see?”

Again, _shrug_.

Dad looks at her.

“I honestly don’t know right now.” She looks away, not really ready to meet his eyes right now. “I mean, the main reason I came here was so that I could spend some time with you. School’s been good, but it gets kind of crazy sometimes.”

Dani snorts.

Valerie side-eyes her. “I heard that.”

“I meant you to.”

Eventually, they settle on a public park, halfway between Dani’s desire to see everything and anything and your complete lack of desire to people today. You like people, honestly, just… not after the last couple of days.

You all take the bus to the center of Amity Park, not too far from Casper High – and not too close to her old neighborhood in the rich-person part of town, where Vlad’s mayoral mansion sits like a creepy poisonous frog in the middle of its personal pond. The park – the only one of any size for the whole city, so that whatever name it has on maps, everyone who lives around here literally just calls it The Park.

The Park being a pun on the town name is… not as annoying to have pointed out as a few years ago. Maybe dealing with Phantom has mellowed her out some. …or maybe Dani is just a smug little shit who knows exactly how annoying that is.

Dani takes off, and Valerie chases her to the edge of the park and back, into the giant sandbox where the little kids’ playground stands. They wind up on the swings, and Dani has no idea what she’s doing, flailing around like she doesn’t know how arms and legs work.

She calls her over. “Pump your legs like this, okay? Don’t worry about the rest, just feel how that feels and let your body do the hard part.”

“My body is a glitch!” Dani yells.

Valerie says nothing, because she doesn’t know what to say that wouldn't anger for Dani’s sake. And Valerie can’t imagine how she could feel that out loud, let it out into reality, without it turning into a big red awfulness of anger-rage-pain-fury that exists on its own, lives almost for its own sake – that gets so big she can’t remember how to do, or feel, or be anything else without it.

She leans back, kicks out, and pushes herself forward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 24 July 2017 #danny phantom #world building week #fanfic #matsuri writes #unedited piece of crud #...a day late #also #this is clearly a rough draft #valerie gray #dani #damon gray #other characters mentioned but they're the only ones to be featured so #see top of post for triggers #(...this is nearly 14 pages long in my WIP doc what)


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